Caregivers vary immensely in terms of their areas of specialty, experience, personality, and other measures. Given the diversity of the marketplace, it is all the more important for care seekers to be able to find the “right” caregiver for their health and wellness needs. Unfortunately, there are no tools currently available that adequately address this need.
When care seekers are unwell, finding the right caregiver can be physically and mentally exhausting. Even when healthy, this search can be frustrating because navigating the options requires time and focus. Care seekers have many things to consider, for example whether the caregiver is: in the care seeker's insurance network, is taking new patients and has openings available, is located within reach of the care seeker, is experienced in the areas of need, and has a personality that will correspond with that of the care seeker's.
Even if the care seeker knows all of the right questions to ask, access to some of the answers is often limited or totally restricted. Hours or days may be spent making phone calls and looking at web sites, yet care seekers may still not get the information they need to make an informed decision on selecting a caregiver. Existing tools have only limited utility. For instance, peer review websites offer limited, out-of-context information that may be only marginally helpful (“what does 3 stars actually mean with respect to a doctor?”). Further, caregiver referrals may be based on favoritism or other unseemly factors that do not coincide with care seeker interests.
Just as it is hard for a single care seeker to find information on caregivers, it is also difficult to compile information on many caregivers to assist care seekers with their search. First, data is scattered (for instance there is consumer data, provider data, insurance data, outcome data, government data, etc.), it may be hard to access, and its quality can be questionable. Data may be skewed (e.g. consumer reviews may slant negative), while provider reviews may generally be positive. Aggregation of the data is time consuming. Also, most data sources may not provide a standardized identifier associated with the caregiver (e.g., National Provider Identification (NPI) number, etc.). Because of these hurdles, it is difficult to compile objective rankings for caregivers. Further, the care seeker health information may not be easily accessible (e.g., information from insurance cards, doctor contact info, prescriptions are often out of reach, human error, unfamiliar words or numbers that are manually entered and/or incorrect, etc.), it is an even more difficult task to determine which caregivers are best for any given care seeker.
Caregivers may also have difficulty connecting with care seekers. For instance, booking patients and/or marketing their services may be a hassle for caregivers. As such, their marketing efforts may be outdated. Some marketing tactics may cause doctors caregivers to lose credibility (e.g., through a service that is known to be cheap or ineffective, etc.). It can be difficult to leverage current patients to grow business (e.g., unknown how to magnify word of mouth) and/or keep a constant flow of patients throughout the year (e.g., there are slow seasons, patients move, doctors find it difficult to use flexible pricing of procedures to attract clients when slow, etc.). Finally, caregiver office managers have high turnover, which further complicates the business of connecting with care seekers.